


Cleanup on Aisle... Oh, I Don’t Know.  All of Them?

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Grocery Store, Curse Breaking, Curses, Dimension Travel, Fluff and Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:33:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23313949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: There were three grocery stores within walking distance from Hajime Hinata’s apartment, but he usually headed down to the very unluckiest one.
Relationships: Hinata Hajime & Komaeda Nagito, Hinata Hajime/Komaeda Nagito
Comments: 12
Kudos: 127





	Cleanup on Aisle... Oh, I Don’t Know.  All of Them?

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there!!! I hope you enjoy this fic, if you read it~~~ I've had it in editing for a while now, and figured I may as well just finally post it. Sorry for anything and everything I might’ve gotten weird. :’) No... no, I really don't know how the Ultimate Imposter has managed to keep this place open!!! 
> 
> Please take care of yourself, and know I’m wishing you well~ Thank you so much for reading!

There were three grocery stores within walking distance from Hajime Hinata’s apartment, but he usually headed down to the very unluckiest one. It wasn’t the “unluckiest” because the selection was especially bad, or anything like that — the stuff was fine, if sometimes a little bruised or smooshed or recently rescued from a sinkhole that opened up in the middle of the store. It was the unluckiest grocery store in the city because one of its employees might very well have been cursed. 

That’s what Nagito Komaeda had murmured to Hajime, at any rate, one of the times he’d stopped by for some dinner things. Hajime had almost gotten clocked on the head by one of the store’s light fixtures, at the time, when the thing came mysteriously unstuck and hurtled down at him. He’d stumbled out of the way, falling nearly into an already-somewhat-precarious tower of canned soup. But somebody caught him at the last second, then. Somebody with flyaway pale hair and dizzy eyes. Somebody with the most beaten-up name tag Hajime had seen in his life. 

That name tag looked like it had been both taped and glued back together in a couple different places only just recently, and the writing was barely visible. _Hi, I’m Nagito! How can I help you today?_

“I’m sorry, sir,” Nagito had said, voice a little swaying and breathless and very close to Hajime’s ear. “That would be my curse, again, I expect. I keep telling the management they’d really be better off firing a troublemaker like me, but Mr. Togami is just too kindhearted for his own good.”

Nagito set Hajime carefully on his feet again, and then hurried away to get a fire extinguisher. The toppled light fixture had begun sparking, after all, and _right next_ to a display of extremely flammable coloring books, too. Nagito knew how that sort of thing generally went. Mr. Togami was a huge man with a collection of dapper suits and enough sense to kept multiple fire extinguishers assigned to every work station. At this grocery store, vegetables with scorch marks on them got sold for one-fourth their usual price, at most! 

You really couldn’t beat the prices at the unluckiest grocery store, in the end... and so Hajime came back again and again, even during Nagito’s especially tumultuous shifts. That was probably how the place stayed open — people rationalizing stuff like that. Hajime waved at Nagito, sometimes, too, and thought the honest, wavery-crooked smiles Nagito offered back looked like the sky clearing for just a second. A sky filled with sirens and distant screaming, honestly, but... hm. Just the same. 

“It’s not smart for you to keep coming around,” Nagito had told Hajime, once or twice in various ways, when helping him at the checkout. One of Nagito’s hands was always shaking, and the other was a prosthetic, built all of something scuffed and durable. “I... um. I suspect things might be a bit more dangerous here for you than they’d be for other people. Please, take care of yourself, sir.”

And, “Oh? Why’s that?” Hajime had asked, but Nagito never explained why shopping could possibly be any more dangerous for him than somebody else. Of course he didn’t. And Hajime _knew_ weird things happened around that store even on days he personally didn’t have to pick up eggs or anything like that. Ordinary grocery stores didn’t generally get taken over by swarms of crows _and_ flooded with soda after a misfired D.I.C.E. gang operation all in the same week, did they? 

Maybe Nagito didn’t want Hajime to swing by and shop there... (and maybe that was pretty damn confusing)... but Hajime still had to eat. Hajime still ended up seeing that Nagito had gotten the cast off his leg, finally, and turned up to work for another day. Nagito was still baffling customers with long, wandering explanations, and his curse hadn’t done him in yet. 

But nothing that’d gone wrong around the unluckiest grocery store in the city up to that point could compare to what happened when Hajime stopped by to pick up some birthday things for his friend Nekomaru Nidai. “Birthday things” in this case mostly meant protein powder and a motivational poster rolled up with a gift ribbon stuck to it, along with a super health food-ish type of cake Hajime wasn’t completely sure anyone beyond Nekomaru himself would enjoy eating. 

Hajime had all those things bundled up in his arms when it happened:

When the store phased temporarily into an impossible place, beyond time and reason and life. 

When the floor started bleeding from between its tiles, and the sky outside went to sticky hollow white, all sickly-sweet mist and far off, half-heard voices. Tendrils of that mist snaked in all over the place, toying at Hajime’s sleeves and clouding up his eyes. Something about them reminded Hajime a little of Nagito’s bleached-white hair. 

“No way— This can’t be —” Hajime gagged. Tasting this air, he could see why Nagito said he didn’t tend to like sweet things.

One of the shelves sprouted legs and shuffled away, then. A creature with too many grasping arms — like a millipede — rifled through the bargain DVD bin, sometimes licking titles, sometimes snapping them in half with hands upon hands upon hands. When Hajime looked at the creature head on, though, it didn’t seem to be completely there. 

This couldn’t be happening. Right?

But if something like this was _going_ to happen, maybe impossibilities sort of belonged at the unluckiest grocery store in town. Or, hell. Had the title “unluckiest grocery store in the world” already been taken?

Hajime had come to the store pretty late at night, this time around. He was just about the only customer inside, and Nagito Komaeda had been mopping the floors, almost ready to close everything up. The only other workers on shift with him — some guys called Kazuichi and Gundham, Hajime thought? — had stepped outside for a minute to smoke or check their phones or something. Gundham announced it, before he left, and Nagito had called, “Got it! Have a nice break.”

But now, when Hajime waded through the tile-blood and syrupy mist to find him, Nagito was hunched over his mop, sticky red water on his hands and his hair in his face. His shoulders were shaking, but it took Hajime a long second to realize that meant he was laughing. Laughing so it rattled all his fragile bones, and reopened a cut at the edge of his mouth. Laughing so he nearly choked on the sweet, heavy mist all around them, and there were stinging tears on his cheeks when he managed to pry his eyes open again and see Hajime waiting there. 

“Oh no,” Nagito said, when he saw him. His voice was hysterical, sure, but maybe a little scolding at the same time. “Oh, sir. _Hajime_. You aren’t supposed to be here. This is all my fault.”

“Your curse, again?” Hajime asked, and Nagito held the mop closer to his chest. He was getting bloody water on his face, and in his hair. Blood was seeping into the cracks of his prosthetic arm and staining his broken name tag. 

“I’m sorry,” Nagito said. “I’m going to have to resign, now... Kazuichi will help you with your — haha, um — your purchases, just as soon as he gets back...”

Hajime crouched down next to Nagito, then, and pried the bloody mop out of his hands. 

“Do you really know what’s going on?” he asked, voice gentle but as firm as Hajime knew how to make it. 

Nagito nodded. 

“Good. So tell me,” Hajime said. 

***

_Tell you?_

_You won’t believe it._

_Did Hajime ever believe in the curse at all? Did anyone, before it was too late?_

_It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter._

_Here goes:_

_There was a hole in the world, where Nagito’s curse trickled in from the other place. The place that shouldn’t have been possible. _

_There was a hole in the world where everything went wrong, and Nagito had belonged to it as long as he could remember._

_Sometimes he fell back in again._

_That was okay —_

_He usually fell back out all in one piece._

_But the only times someone came into that other place with him... well then. Well then, things went horribly crooked, didn’t they? It had been Nagito’s parents. And then his pet dog. And then the only kid in class who would talk to him. People got lost here, or something devoured them, or they changed into unknowable creatures right before Nagito’s eyes. _

_This wasn’t supposed to happen. Hajime always spoke so honestly to Nagito, too, and didn’t back away from him when he said something weird on accident. He seemed kind, in a rough, self-conscious way. He seemed like someone Nagito could understand, if Hajime let him. He seemed like he’d have warm hands and good taste in movies._

_Nagito warned Hajime to stay away from the store, stay away from him, but maybe some traitorous part of himself had hoped Hajime wouldn’t actually do it. Nagito made sure soft drinks Hajime liked stayed fully stocked, even when of course he knew what happened to people who got too close to him._ _Who he could have grown to care about —_

_Isn’t that funny?_

_This wasn’t supposed to happen to Hajime Hinata. Hajime was supposed to have a normal life. Nagito could tell, just the second he looked at him, buying cup noodles and bags of clementines, buying cold medicine and spiral notebooks and ordinary things for an amazingly safe, amazingly ordinary person._

_Nagito explained all this as well as he could, and watched, eyes very far away, hardly believing it was real, as Hajime slipped off his coat and started using it to swab the blood of Nagito’s face. Hajime worked quietly, through all those impossible words, that rattling laughter. When he was finished, he asked if Nagito would like to wipe his hands off on the coat, too._

_Tell you?_

_You won’t believe it. You shouldn’t have to believe it._

_Creatures seethed around them all the time, then, with heads made of cracked geodes or mouths covering every inch of their bodies. The windows shattered themselves into words, words from no language any human had ever learned. The air drifted and squirmed, sweetness hurting inside Nagito’s lungs the way it always did. It was too much. It was the rotten stuff he belonged to._

_Nagito couldn’t have guessed how long Hajime sat with him, or all the ridiculous things he said. But by the time he finished saying them, whatever they were, Hajime Hinata was still there and his health food-ish cake had gotten ruined in the bloody mop water._

_After a while, the night sky came back outside the windows, and Hajime offered Nagito an adrenaline-weary grin, despite everything. Hajime’s smile was like the sky clearing, wasn’t it? His smile was like the stars coming back, and Nagito’s coworkers storming in from their break demanding, “Okay — what the actual hell happened here?!”_

***

There were three grocery stores within walking distance from Hajime Hinata’s apartment, but he didn’t usually visit his boyfriend at work, anymore, at least not until most shoppers had gone home for the day. It was pretty rare for Nagito to get swallowed back into that place where his curse breathed and waited, but better safe than sorry... at least until they managed to shake the damn thing once and for all. Mr. Togami could only afford so many repairs monthly, and Hajime was learning more about curses every day. 

Nagito came home with groceries for the both of them, more often than not, sometimes with the tips of his hair just a little bit singed, sometimes with his sneakers gone squishy from a flood, trailing water behind him on the sidewalk. He came home with surprises he knew Hajime would like, and promises that he’d understand when Hajime inevitably broke up with him. Hajime liked to think Nagito was beginning to accept that unless _he_ wanted to break up with _Hajime_ , that day wasn’t gonna come anytime soon.

It had been a year since Nekomaru Nidai’s last birthday, now, and Nagito came home with a health food-ish cake neither of them honestly wanted to eat. They’d gotten a pretty good deal, considering it was from the unluckiest grocery store in the world. 

**Author's Note:**

> As a potentially fun fact, this is the SECOND fic I’ve written that involves getting transported to an alternate world from inside a grocery store. Maybe I just see them as super-liminal spaces, or something like that??? 
> 
> Thank you, again!!!


End file.
